I have AMD Quad-Core Phenom II 955 @ 3.2GHz (It can go up to 3.8 if needed).

I may get high performance SSD (500 MB/s write/read) and if I encrypt the whole volume how much of a performance hit would I take?

Yes, encrypting 7200rpm HDDs won't have no performance hits because they are slow anyway. But if I encrypt a SSD what should I be looking at? My CPU got to get memory from SSD -> Decrypt -> RAM then RAM -> Encrypt -> SSD. In-game performance won't be hurt that much as they run from RAM but the loading times will.

However if I can only decrypt at 300 MB/s or something it will be very bad since I be getting a SSD for the performance.

Of course, one day I will upgrade my CPU again. But that's after I get a 2x SSD enclosure, 2x SSD, among other things and a laptop supporting USB3.

Little side question. USB3 will support 500 MB/s? I assume so since the spec of USB3 but I like to see your opinions.

You might also want to consider that decrypting data takes cpu work, which you then can't use for something else at the same time. Especially for gaming this could be an issue, for example preloading new areas while cpu is used for doing stuff in the current area.
–
EroenJan 30 '12 at 1:08

1 Answer
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TrueCrypt has an integrated benchmark. You should base your choice on the results of it.

Settings > Performance... > Benchmark

I expect around 500MB/s using all 4 cores extrapolating from my own CPU, but I'm not familiar with the AES performance of AMD CPUs. Of course disk encryption using all of your CPU power might be undesirable while playing.

When getting a new CPU it'd be nice to have one that supports AES-NI instructions, since those speed up decryption quite a bit.